Tech

Facebook creates Community Help tool so users can aid each other after disasters

Facebook just made it a lot easier for users to find and give help in the wake of crises and disasters.

The social media company has created Community Help, a new tool tied to the Safety Check feature that lets users ask for and offer help after marking themselves safe during a crisis. Facebook announced the tool at its first Social Good Forum in New York on Thursday.

The tool, which will be tested in December and officially launch in January 2017, will pop up after a user activates Safety Check. Once you mark yourself as safe, Facebook will lead you to a page that shows others' safety statuses, as well as posts from people offering and looking for help in the area.

"You might be safe, but that doesn't mean you don't need help."

You'll be able to click "Find Help," choose from categories such as Food & Water, Transportation, Shelter and Baby Items, and then create a post that further explains what you need. If you want to offer help, like a spare room or extra food, you can scroll through the posts and directly message someone who needs your help, or create a new post with details of what you can provide.

"Community Help is the next evolution of Safety Check," Naomi Gleit, VP of Social Good at Facebook, told Mashable. "You might be safe, but that doesn't mean you don't need help."

Image: Facebook

Gleit used May's destructive wildfire in Fort McMurray, Alberta, as an example to illustrate the potential of Community Help. She said people in the area created a Facebook group, where many users posted specific things they needed — but it didn't work as seamlessly as it could have. She said two people posted in the group — one looking for shelter, the other offering it — but they never saw each other.

With Community Help as a hub of information, Facebook believes users will be able to find each other better, and therefore help each other quicker and more efficiently.

"We already see a ton of this behavior on Facebook today," Peter Cottle, Safety Check Engineer at Facebook, told Mashable. "After the wildfire in Fort McMurray, there were 100,000 people in one of the biggest groups, exchanging donations, supplies, transportation. So we see a lot of that activity on Facebook already. We’re just building a better location and better space for those people to interact."

Gleit also said they saw people using Google Docs in crisis situations, with thousands of rows of what people could offer.

"How are you supposed to match those up?" she said. "Similarly, two random posts in a group that never found each other. [Community Help] is a way to structure this, so we can reach people efficiently."

Naomi Gleit, VP of Social Good at Facebook, announces Community Help at the company's Social Good Forum in New York on Nov. 17, 2016.

Image: Facebook/Jennifer Leahy

The announcement of Community Help comes at the same time as a shift in Facebook's Safety Check feature, which is now completely community-triggered, and no longer activated by the company. When a high number of people are posting about an incident in a given area, Facebook will automatically notify those users and ask if they're OK. A user can then mark themselves as safe and prompt friends to do the same, instead of Facebook sending notifications to everyone.

That change is an effort to give people close to disasters more power in deciding when Safety Check is helpful.

Now, with Community Help in tandem with Safety Check, Facebook's goal seems to be empowering users to activate and use these tools on their own — with little involvement from the company itself.

"This is something we've seen people do after a crisis on Facebook — offer shelter, food, transportation — and we want to make that even easier by building products for that," Gleit said.

At the Social Good Forum, Gleit introduced a video of Patrick Meier (above), who has worked at the intersection of humanitarian efforts and emerging technology for 15 years. His wife was in Haiti during the devastating earthquake in 2010. It took seven hours to know she was OK — something tools like Safety Check and Community Help could potentially prevent.

BONUS: Facebook Safety Check

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